Bob Katter (Kennedy, Katter's Australian Party) Share this | Hansard source

TTER () (): The Labor Party, from my experience over nearly 50 years as a member for parliament—the labour movement, the unions will take it and cop it for a fair while, out of loyalty to the Labor Party, and then they've got to make some examples. They've got to let the Labor Party know that they give the money and support for the Labor Party on condition that the Labor Party looks after their working members. You can't con them all the time. That's the problem, Labor Party: you can't con them all the time. The ACTU has brought out some wonderful stuff, like how one in two jobs since 2013 go to temporary visa holders.

The minister says, 'Oh, the law.' Minister, go out and have a yarn with your local taxi driver or taxi owner and ask him how good your laws are. Do any of the people in this House know what's really going on in the world? Go into the workplaces that the honourable member for Melbourne has talked about. Go into the workplaces and see that, yes, the law is being met and, yes, they are paying them award wages; but they charge them $200 a week for accommodation. The accommodation consists of three beds on that side, three beds on that side and a metre and a half between the two beds. That's the room, and about 60 or 70 people share a toilet and a bathroom.

The migration agents and the visa agents get a big quid out of it. Of course, they have to give a kickback to the employer. He's not going to do business with them unless he is getting something out of it. You simply have a round robin that's going on. To say that the Liberals and the Labor Party don't know about this is not just Machiavellian but positively Orwellian. The free trade policies introduced by Mr Whitlam took 25 per cent of the tariffs away across the board. Mr Keating announced that we would be the most free economy on earth, with no restrictions on trade, and we would be the tough guys on the block.

I always use the analogy of the gladiator. We say to our gladiator, 'Give me your helmet, give me your shield, mate, and go into the arena.' The gladiator says, 'The other bloke has a shield and a helmet to protect him. Aren't I going to get the bad ending?' We say, 'No, it will make you tough. Fighting with a sword, without any protection, will make you tough.' The gladiator says, 'It won't make me tough. It will make me dead.' That's what the gladiator called the motor vehicle industry said: 'It won't make me tough. It will make me dead. I don't exist any more.' The gladiator that is the whitegoods industry says, 'It won't make me tough. It will make me dead.' The whitegoods industry has gone. The textile industry has gone. The glass industry has gone. The steel industry, the same as the motor vehicle industry, said, 'If you don't do something, we can't stay on in Australia.' It's three-quarters gone. There is only a quarter of it left; it's about to go as well. The aluminium industry, of course, is also doomed under your policies. What have you got left?

These people come in here and not one of them would know a moo-cow or a sheep from a damn scarecrow. They come in here and tell us, 'It will be good for rural Australia!' How good? Our beef production is down 20 per cent, our dairy production is down 30 per cent, our sugar production is down 17 per cent and our sheep herd is down 70 per cent. That's four out of your five big guys. I dare say the fifth one, the grains industry, is doomed. We can't possibly compete with the Americans, who are cross-subsidised by ethanol. The Brazilian sugar industry is cross-subsidised by ethanol. For seafood and pork, we are now the importers of seafood and pork. Half the time, we are now importers of fruit and vegetable. What sector of agriculture did it help? It didn't help agriculture. It didn't help manufacturing.

God bless the trade union movement, because they've been a bit slow in awakening. But as Napoleon said, 'Don't wake up China. If it wakes, it will shape the world.' I will tell you, the trade union movement is waking up and they are going to start kicking out the Labor members whose endorsements they are going to remove. If they don't, they are not worth feeding as a trade union movement. But I have great faith in the union movement. They have never supported us in the last 15 years, but we support them and we will continue to support them. That's because Australia needs that.

The member for Melbourne Ports is absolutely dead right: it is a mockery. How could the minister think that when he comes from the Atherton Tablelands? I don't mean to be personal. He is a nice guy. His parents are lovely people. They would be great contributors up there. But he comes into this place and says he is not aware of what happened in the tobacco industry, whose product was on the crest of his own local authority, and he doesn't know what happened to the dairy and maize industries, whose products were on the crest of a nearby local authority. He says he doesn't know what happened to any of these industries. Well, of course he does. He knows exactly what happened to them. But he has a policy, like the Labor Party, of free trade.

Anyone who reads history books knows about those great men in the AWU, for example. The ALP leader comes out of the AWU. Their entire executive was jailed for three years with hard labour for having a work stoppage. The Labor movement are the people really betraying their own people. Their betrayal is on a scale that every history book will write about. Don't think the workers of Australia, with their hard hats and hard hands, are so dumb that they can't pick it up. I'll be doing a little tour through a number of industrial areas shortly, and if they haven't woken up I'll be waking them up; that's for certain. They're not going to keep copping it. It was the Labor Party that introduced the mass visa entrance to this country, which has undermined our pay and conditions. Our biggest employer in this country is the mining industry, where wages have gone down from around $200,000 a year—which miners richly deserve, because it is dangerous and hard, and you have to live away from home now—down to $100,000, and they won't be stopping there.

The union movement—the ACTU and the CFMEU—have done brilliant papers on the casualisation of labour, the dangers of section 457, the undermining of our pay and conditions, and the race to the bottom. To back up the honourable member for Melbourne Ports, if a Chinese company is considering buying a corporation in Australia and they know they can bring their own workers in and, through round robins, pay them half of what Australian companies have to pay, that company becomes a marvellous target for China, because they know that they can take the whole Australian market out from under everyone. Let me turn to the electricity industry, one of the most important industries, if not the most important industry, in this country. I'm not going to go into that. When we put solar panels on the roofs, we send the jobs to China, of course, and close down the jobs in the power stations and the mines in Australia, but we won't go into that; that's an aside. The real issue in electricity is that I was under the impression that China had 25 per cent of the electricity industry, but it appears now that they have more like 40 per cent of the Australian industry, and they have a number of workers in key positions.

Let me be very specific: in the Tully sugar mill, which has been bought by the Chinese, the CEO, the manager of the mill, is now Chinese. All of the staff in the administration building, I'm told reliably, are now Chinese. Very soon, all the foremen and senior positions in that sugar mill will be Chinese. They're probably paying these people half, effectively, of what was being paid before, so already they've got a market advantage on the other sugar mills. So the other sugar mills—which, I might add, are mostly Chinese owned too—will start competing. So you're watching not the race to the bottom but the drive to the bottom.

But the Australian people are waking up. Where we can get our message out in places like North Queensland, we and the other minor parties are rolling up nearly 40 per cent of the vote, whereas the best the mainstream parties can do is 30 per cent. This is six or seven per cent of the population of Australia, so, if we do that in four or five other places, you big parties are gone. You will go where you deserve to go, into oblivion, which is exactly what happened to the free market parties in this country at the turn of the last century.

As I walk into this place, I put up my fist in solidarity with the first member for Kennedy, Charlie McDonald, one of the founders of the Labor movement in this country. If he knew what was taking place here, he would spit on the people on this side of the parliament. He would expect it from that side of the parliament, but he would spit on these people on this side of the parliament, because they are the ones that really commenced all of this. If you have a look at how much free trade they are responsible for compared to the Liberals, they win pretty comfortably. It is a very sad day for the people of Australia, who have showed 100 years of loyalty to the Labor movement, that they could be betrayed on the scale that they are being betrayed upon. I take great confidence in backing my colleagues in the cross benches on this issue— (Time expired)

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